


something to fight for

by zweebie



Category: The Last of Us
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Yeah that's what this is, emphasis on nothing happens, i need to write more tlou fic but it is just. so sad, i saw a tumblr post like "yknow that niche oneshot where nothing happens but feelings", joel's guitar makes a lil cameo, survivor's guilt, there's no happy ending here whoopsies, things are cute i guess??? but also very sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-02-22 22:24:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23668006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zweebie/pseuds/zweebie
Summary: "I struggled for a long time with survivin'. And you—No matter what, you keep finding something to fight for."The town is kind of perfect, small and squat and self-sufficient, exactly like Ellie had heard Tommy say back at the dam, all those months ago. “You know how we thought no one could live like this anymore? Well, we’re doing it here.” It’s kind of a revelation, a place where the leaders aren’t corrupt dickholes and where people actually get to eat every day. A place where there aren’t soldiers patrolling strictly after sundown, waiting to shoot you if they catch you outside after curfew. Ellie doesn't deserve it.Or, Ellie knows Joel is lying, but she doesn't tell him so.
Relationships: Ellie & Joel (The Last of Us)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 52





	something to fight for

**Author's Note:**

> never expected to get so attached to a game !! am now in the depths of hell !! xx

It doesn’t set in for a long time. How can it? Something like this shouldn’t be easy, shouldn’t be simple. Time. Years. A life. A few extra days—only a few, probably, if she’s being honest. Odds are the town would be overrun by infected in a week or less, or hunters, or fireflies, or military, or worse. And then they would be killed, eaten, bitten, left lying in bleeding heaps, convulsing, jaws snapping—

She can’t think about it.

The town is kind of perfect, small and squat and self-sufficient, exactly like Ellie had heard Tommy say back at the dam, all those months ago. “You know how we thought no one could live like this anymore? Well, we’re doing it here.” It’s kind of a revelation, a place where the leaders aren’t corrupt dickholes and where people actually get to eat every day. A place where there aren’t soldiers patrolling strictly after sundown, waiting to shoot you if they catch you outside after curfew. That’s what Joel tells her it will be like, at least.

It’s fully alien to her, almost impenetrable. 

They reach the edge of the town at dusk, when the light is at its tipping point and there’s a hush over everything. “Hey, maybe we can get in there,” Ellie says, pointing to a bare stretch of fence, free of the barbed-topping the rest had. 

“No, let’s go in the front gates.” Joel puts a hand on her arm, leading her to the left, away from the stretch of fence. “Something tells me Tommy’s gonna want a warning before he sees me.” He laughs a single ha, but Ellie doesn’t smile. He frowns a little, and she knows he noticed, but he doesn’t push it. “I tell you, you’re gonna like this place.”

“What, have you ever been here?”

“Not once, but I know Tommy, and he cares about this sort of stuff. Making people comfortable, and all that. I always thought, as long as you were alive, who cares? But Tommy really went for it. And now, I mean, after all of this...a little comfort couldn’t hurt.”

“I guess,” Ellie says, a little quieter than maybe she needs to, but she’s not exactly feeling talkative. She hasn’t been for a while. They walk the rest of the way like that, quiet, Joel tense and Ellie feeling like she’s been crying for hours, that hollow and wrung-out feeling that you only get when you’re really distraught. She hasn’t been crying, though, just twisted and turned and yeah, maybe a little wrung out. Dried up. 

* * *

They made her stay in a cell for the first few days, as a “safety precaution,” even though she’d turned herself in and sworn to them that everything she’d told them was real. People in lab coats would come down to her little wing, fascinated by her, scribbling in tiny little notebooks. The glass was thick, with holes drilled into the bottom to let in air. If she’d punched it, kicked it, it probably wouldn’t have broken. She wondered a few times, when it was only her and an armed guard in the prison area, if she could have shattered it with her knife. It didn’t matter. The first thing they’d done when she arrived was take her backpack and her clothes, getting her stuck with a papery hospital gown. She didn’t know where they were or if she’d ever get them back.

The wound on her forearm was getting worse by the day—if not spreading the way that Riley’s had. It was festering, moldering, and pus had bubbled up in several places, but it didn’t hurt. She hated looking at it. She wanted to cover it up, but it wasn’t like she had many options. The cell was empty except for her, and for the plates of food the guards passed to her three times a day.

It took them two weeks to let her out, and it was only that day that she saw Marlene in person. She shut the door behind her quietly, and then ordered the guard to leave.

“But the girl—”

“Just go,” Marlene said, and there must have been something in her voice, because the man went without another word. 

  
The moment the guard left the room, Ellie leapt up, throwing herself against the glass barrier. “What’s going on! What’s wrong with me? Are you letting me go?”

Marlene’s face didn’t change. “Ellie, slow down,” she said, slowly. “There are still more measures we need to take.”

“The fuck do you mean, more measures? I’ve been stuck in here for days, hardly eating, and there are fucking, fucking scientists in here every single day taking notes on me and refusing to talk to me at all and all the while my wound is getting fucking worse, look at it, and no one’s telling me what’s going on inside me! What other measures could you possibly take?”

“I’m not sure you realise what a serious situation this is,” Marlene said, and maybe it’s the way she’s refusing to answer her fucking questions, or maybe it’s the condescension, but Ellie couldn’t take it.

“I don’t—You think I don’t realise how serious this fucking situation is? I was bitten! I was infected! I expected to wake up in the morning fucking crazy and a monster and that never happened and now I’m just here, waiting, with a bite on my arm, and you think I’m not taking this seriously enough? Are you fucking kidding me? You have no idea what I’m feeling right now.” 

Marlene shut her eyes for a moment, and Ellie clenched her fist. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe this glass would shatter under her punch. 

“Ellie,” Marlene said, drawing out the word. “The scientists didn’t talk to you because they thought you were infected. An animal.”

“Yeah, no shit they did—” Ellie growled, but Marlene cut her off. 

“I can tell that there’s something more going on here. I mean, you’re speaking. You haven’t shown any symptoms of infection other than the inflammation of the skin, and even that stayed confined to the bite spot. It’s a miracle.”

“I think you think this is all news to me, but it’s not.”

“I know, just...let me get through this.” Marlene takes a breath. “The average incubation period before the symptoms of infection take hold is twenty hours. Rare cases will make it to forty-eight. You’ve gone for over one-hundred-and-sixty hours without exhibiting more than a few mild symptoms. There’s something in your blood, Ellie, and it’s fighting off the infection. We don’t know what it is, or if it’s even traceable.”

“Okay, so you’ve got nothing.”

“No, Ellie, it isn’t nothing. It’s the opposite of nothing. You’ve got something inside you that knows how to fight off the infection. We don’t know if it’s something genetic, or if you’ve developed some sort of mutation that immunizes you. But once we figure that out, we might be able to extract it. And then…”

“You could find a cure,” Ellie breathes.

“Or, if not a cure, a vaccination.” 

“Whoa.”

Marlene lets it sit for a moment before continuing. 

“There’s nothing we can do while we’re here, though. We have a base across the city, at the north end. We were thinking that maybe, if we could smuggle you across the guarded zone, and get you there, they could get you out to our lab. They’ve been working for a cure for the last two years. You would be a miracle for them.”

Ellie sits back, unable to process it all. “So I could be the cure,” she said, slowly.

  
“You could be the cure.”

“Holy shit.” 

“That’s right,” Marlene says, with a bit of a smile.

Ellie was ready to pack up and leave right that second, make the trek and try to be at the base by morning, but Marlene had other plans. In the end, they decided to have her out four days later, smuggled by Marlene and two of the Firefly’s agents. From there, it was unsure. There were more firefly agents at the base to help her, but it could be days or weeks or even months before she reached the firefly lab, all depending on whether or not they could get their hands on a car. But she had no control over that.

For those four days the fireflies let her into a proper room, a small one, but a real one. It didn’t have a glass barrier and it didn’t have airholes; it had a proper door and a proper window, both unlocked. She was given her backpack again, along with the promise that she would get her knife back when they left for the mission. 

But then the day of the mission came, and everything went to shit. They left in the late afternoon, in the hopes that they would be able to do the majority of the trip under the cover of night. Ellie was given her knife, but, despite her protests, no gun. Apparently, Marlene was afraid she would blow their cover. 

“I’m not a kid, I can shoot! And it’s not like I’m gonna accidentally set the gun off!”

“It’s our responsibility to get you to the lab safely, and I’m going to take every precaution possible.”

“But—”

“End of conversation,” she’d said.

“Fine, but it’s not my fault if I get killed because I can’t fucking defend myself,” Ellie had grumbled, pulling her backpack on.

“You’ll be fine.”

They’d gotten through the first stretch fine, but then they’d gotten to the quarry and it had all blown up in their faces. Marlene said that someone must have tipped off the military, but the agent next to her had insisted that there weren’t any traitors with them. 

“You can’t trust anyone here. I thought you’d been on the job long enough to know that by now,” Marlene had said, pulling her gun out of its holster.

They’d shoved Ellie in a little room off of an alleyway, despite her protests that she could fight just as well as any of them. For what felt like a couple of hours, she was alone in there, listening to the yelling and the gunshots outside. When Marlene had come back, she’d had a man and a woman with her. 

* * *

Joel goes off at some point to find food—the guards at the gate had found Tommy quickly enough, and he’d arranged for them to live in one of the empty rooms in his house. 

“It’s two bedroom,” he said, “and clean enough. We have a kitchen and everything. Can you believe it, Joel?”

Joel had laughed, and said, “Guess I have to.”

Ellie was given bed roll duty—they had a stash in a shed somewhere, probably mold-eaten shit-stained stuff, but that was what she was used to. It was all the way across the little town, but Ellie wasn’t complaining. It would give her time to think. She had a lot to think about.

By then the sun had said, and the town was lit up, each house working with actual, real life electricity, presumably from the dam she and Joel had visited so many months ago. She hadn’t seen so much life in one place, ever, outside of Boston, and Boston could hardly count. Not with its soldiers patrolling the street, not with its hazmat suits and executions and daily trainings. Boston had a tang of fear hanging in the air, so thick you could taste it on your tongue. This place was different. It felt content. 

There were soldiers here, too, of course. But they looked human in a way that the military didn’t. They were standing at street corners chatting, laughing together, and they held themselves with an ease that Ellie almost couldn’t recognize. They weren’t robots, scanning the streets and standing stiffly at their posts. They weren’t even wearing uniforms. What was it Tommy had said? That the adults took turns patrolling? It was kind of amazing. 

She supposed that if she walked far enough she would see the farms, another impossibility. She tried to imagine living on a farm—waking up in the morning to the sound of a rooster crowing like in the picture books she’d read as a kid, spending all day in a tractor in the wheat fields, or feeding chickens. Ellie doesn’t think that she could survive living in a place like that, a place so peaceful. Maybe violence had settled into her bones. She was fucking infected, after all.

* * *

She didn’t kill Riley; she could never have killed Riley. Even after she had turned into one of the infected, really turned into one, Ellie knows she would never have done it. She would have let Riley kill her before that, easy choice, one hundred percent. Anyway, she didn’t have to kill her. 

When Ellie woke, it had been to Riley’s quiet moaning. Ellie thinks that now, she wouldn’t be as fucking stupid. She would have recognized the sounds of the infected and she would have run for her life. Reached for her knife, at least. But instead she looked at Riley’s hunched, quivering figure, and said, “Riley? Hey, you okay?”

Riley’s head snapped up. Her face was fucked up in ways that Ellie hates to think about, puffed and scarred and pus and sores everywhere.

So Ellie ran. She was fucking terrified, more afraid than she’d ever been in her life, god damn heart pounding hands shaking tears in her eyes and goddammit she was supposed to be turned too, she was supposed to be with Riley, not running away from her, she was supposed to be with Riley always, this couldn’t be real. And yet here she was, rushing wildly away from her best friend, feet catching on broken glass and bits of shrapnel from the broken window. 

Riley’s voice was horrible, something out of a nightmare, and even though Ellie had heard the runner’s moans a million times before, there was something so specially terrifying about hearing them in her own friend’s voice, in the voice that she knew better than her own. She knew it’s laughter as well as she knew its tears, and hearing it guttural and desperate and hollow chills her to the bone. Fuck. Ellie clambered onto her feet, sprinting back into the mall, away from the scaffolding and the broken windows. She didn’t dare to turn and look, but she can hear Riley’s rasping breaths and her pounding feet, and she knows she’s close behind. 

She’d never run this fast, not in the academy, and certainly not before. It wasn’t enough. Riley was still right on her heels, and, from the sound of it, getting closer. Ellie rushed through the doorway, taking a precious moment to grab the knob and slam it shut behind her. Now, she would have barricaded it, but then she just sprinted in the other direction, turning corners in the dusky hallways until she reached the open center of the mall. 

“Oh, fuck,” she muttered. Where now? She took the first instinct. She turned right, toward the arcade, and ran as fast as her feet could carry her. How do you escape a runner? For a moment, she thinks of her knife, tucked in her backpack. It’s not safe, she told herself, I can’t get close to her or she’ll kill me, but some part of her knows that it’s not her safety she’s worried about. She wasn’t sure whether or not she’d survive seeing Riley’s faceslashed and red. It would be worse than dying, she thought. So she kept pushing forward.

Riley’s haggard breaths followed.

The green glint of the exit sign was welcome. She turned toward it, having to pause to figure out which escalator to jump onto, but she climbed on clumsily before Riley caught her. 

The door was only a few feet away when she heard a crashing sound behind her. Fuck. What the fuck? She spun to see Riley, clumsy and animal, falling over herself on the escalator stairs. Ellie tore her eyes away from it and turned, running through the door. She slammed it shut, knocking the chair next to it over across the door. It was flimsy and weak, but maybe it would trip Riley. Trip it. 

And then it’s the final stretch, one hallway until she reached the grey, dull metal door that lead to the world outside. One push and she was out. 

She heard a shot. 

Quick, loud, ringing in her ear. It was close. And then another, and third. Three shots in quick succession, a guttural wail, and then men’s voices, loud and professional. She skids to a halt, biting her lip in the process so hard that it bleeds.

Was that Riley’s scream?

She can’t think about it. She pushes through the door and runs out, into the city and away.

It was a long week before she showed herself—she hid in every alley she could find, stealing ration cards and pulling scraps of food out of dumpsters. She couldn’t believe it’s there at all—who would waste food during a global pandemic? But she wasn’t complaining. 

The day after she flees the mall, she goes back. She stopped at a clothing store, stripped almost entirely bare by hoarders, and managed to find a long-sleeved black shirt which is, miraculously, in her size. She stripped and pulled it on, putting her pink t-shirt on over it. The sleeves covered up the bite. She thought that this would be better, hopefully. She wouldn’t have to hide herself quite as much anymore, at least not in areas far from the military school. 

They hadn’t put out any sort of search party for her, not that she’d expected them to. They hadn’t done shit when Riley had disappeared. Kids got bitten all the time. Even if the military had tried their goddamned best to hide it. And what was the point of searching for a runner? Even if that runner used to be a kid.

Still, better safe than sorry, and she tried her best not to go near the school itself. If another student saw her, or worse, one of the overseeing soldiers, then they’d find her bite. The first thing they’d do is check if she’s infected, since she’d been missing, and once they knew she was, no matter what she said, they would euthanize her. That couldn’t happen.

At least now people who saw her on the street wouldn’t be able to tell she was infected.

After she puts on the shirt, she headed outside. Without thinking much, she went toward the escalators, telling herself that maybe there will be more supplies upstairs. That’s not why she’s going, and she knows it. But if she faces the real reason head-on, she might break down.

At the bottom of the escalator was Riley. It had only been twenty-four hours, but she had got the first signs of something growing from her forehead, and she was broken up and old and looking awful. Ellie threw her hands up to her mouth.. Fuck. There was a ghastly bullet wound in her head, open flesh and bone, and her eyes were nowhere to be seen. “Riley,” she breathed, and then she looked around once, turned, and ran.

She found a little abandoned store, shut the doors, barricaded the windows, curled up in a corner, and started to sob.

Why had they gone out? Why had they gone to the mall? Why had they played the fucking music? It was all just so...so fucking stupid. Idiotic, in retrospect. She couldn’t believe it. If they hadn’t gone; if Riley had come to the school and they’d stayed up all night, stolen snacks from the cafeteria like they’d used to. She could have given her the water gun, and they could have fucking kissed and all would be right in the world. The school wouldn’t take Riley back in, but they would run away, find somewhere to hide, away from the fireflies as well as the military, and they would be fucking good and happy and alive together, and fucking hell Ellie can’t think about it, but she has to, because there’s nothing in this empty fucking world except for her and Riley and now Riley is gone.

She’s the only person left. 

Weeks pass, and then she, Joel, and Tess are in the abandoned Firefly base, and it happens again. 

They hurried off, running past the doors and only after seeing Tess’s body, broken and bleeding, lying on the floor while soldiers stepped over her like she’s nothing. Ellie couldn’t help but think of what would happen after. The fungus, sprouting from her limbs. Crawling along the floor. Tess’s eyes, split open.

She could tell it broke Joel. She wonders how long they’d known each other. From the way they worked together, it was years. 

It broke her too. Tess was kind. She wondered how this had never happened; how she had never been friends with an infected before. She wasn’t naive enough to think kind people were immortal, but fuck. She wished they were.

And all the while, the wound on her forearm was festering away.

Then it was Sam. She was friends with Sam, proper friends. The entire time she knew him, she just kept thinking about how young he was. Like she wasn’t that young, too. But she couldn’t stop getting the image of Riley’s fucked up face in her head. She was never like this, before. She’s always had some semblance of control over her thoughts. But maybe becoming the savior for all mankind did something to you.

Sam was sweet. She read him puns out of her book, and he actually liked them, and showed it. She knew Joel thought they were at least a little funny, saw the small smile on his face, but he always said that she drove him crazy, so it was nice to get some validation for once. 

She gave him a toy, and he didn’t even get to play with it.

Waking up to him was too close to that morning in the mall. Seeing him shaking and growling in the corner, in the same fucking curled up position Riley was. And still, like an idiot, she didn’t realise. She spoke to him.

And then Joel shot Sam, and Henry shot himself, and everything went to shit.

That night they stayed in another one of the houses; they tried to push on, tried to keep moving, but in the end Joel admitted that he was just tired, and they paused, spent the afternoon in some poor stranger’s kitchen. 

“Has that happened to you before?” Ellie asked, as they sat around their little fire.

“What, hunters?” 

“No, you...you know what I mean.”

Joel sighed. “Yeah. A couple...a couple friends I’ve had. I told you that I...that I was a…”

“A hunter?” Ellie said, her voice quiet.

“Yeah. And several people...I mean, people were just getting bitten left and right, there. And god knows they deserved it, but…”

“No one deserves that.”

“Yeah, I mean…” He didn’t continue, and Ellie didn’t press him. She just stares at the flickering fire, fingering the sleeve of her long-sleeve shirt. She still hadn’t mustered up the courage to take it off, and she wasn’t going to anytime soon.

* * *

There are children in the camp. For some reason, of everything, that’s what takes her fully by surprise. Honest-to-fucking-god children, little and shrill and running around on their chubby little sausage legs. There had been kids at the military camp, but they were kept in a separate division to hers, and she and the other teenage recruits had barely seen them. 

God. Children. 

They’re painfully small, and looking at them running around, pushing each other, playing tag, makes Ellie’s heart hurt. If Joel had been there, Elie would have mentioned that it maybe doesn’t seem safe to have kids out in the middle of things like this, making noise and in danger. But there was a man across the way, yelling from his lit up stall about the necklaces he was selling, and there were two women behind her having a conversation. So maybe everyone was allowed to be loud. Maybe everyone was safe.

She can’t help but think, though, of the kids if the town was ever attacked. Of what would happen if one of their parents got infected. Would they be able to tell the difference between their mother and the runner that she now was? Would they run right into danger’s arms? 

Did children get infected? They probably don’t survive an attack, let alone live to become mindless zombies.

Ellie’s heart hurts. Her eyes hurt. She brushes the tears away, clenching her jaw in determination. She will not break down.

She could have stopped this. That was what this entire year old trip was for. To stop this.

She thinks that she was one of these kids, once, running around like she didn’t have a care in the world. She thinks that her hands are shaking around her backpack straps.

She thinks that she’s accidentally stopped walking.

It takes all of her effort, but she takes another step, and then another. It’s not that far now to the shed that Tommy had pointed out. Not too far to a night’s rest. And then the next day, and then the next night, and then forever and ever and ever. When is this fucking journey going to end?

A little boy squeals, and Ellie keeps going.

* * *

The bed rolls are stacked in a little cottage. She’d expected them to be covered in mud, rotten, moldering, but whoever restored the shed had done a remarkably good job, because it’s fully airtight, and there’s no way for the fabric to actually rot. Next to them are folded sheets, not quite as well-kept as the bed rolls, but still dry and intact and Ellie wants to cry a little. She doesn’t let herself.

She takes a pair of each, and they’re too warm in her arms, too soft. It’s not far, now, to Tommy’s house. His house with a kitchen, and two bedrooms, and “can you believe it?” Ellie can’t. She doesn’t think she’s ever lived in a proper house. She can’t even remember a time before the military school, and while she was there it was just ratty little dorm rooms, never quite clean and never quite dry. But this is a house. Multiple rooms, all for her, Joel, Tommy, and Maria. She finds it hard to believe that anybody could have found this normal before the outbreak. 

This is the end of the journey. It’s not the end that she’d expected, but it’s an end. There are people in that house that can maybe, just maybe, be the family she’d never had. And odds are this is all going to fall apart and go to shit within the next few weeks, but at least she’s got people that she loves with her.

A man walks past her with a little girl, maybe seven years old, on his shoulder. Ellie was seven when she got taken into the academy. She can’t remember a life before that; she can’t even remember her first few months there. She remembers meeting Riley, but she was eight, then. She definitely doesn’t remember a father. 

Joel is probably at the house by now. She’s not sure how she feels about that.

* * *

“Swear to me that everything you said about the Fireflies is true.”

“I swear.”

“Okay.” 

She’s not sure, even now, what that okay meant. Did it mean I trust you? Did it mean I know you’re telling the truth? I think you’re lying, but you know what’s best for me? I think you’re lying, but I don’t care?

I think you’re lying.

Ellie knows what the surgery entails, what being the fucking savior, the fucking last hope for all mankind, entails. She knows what it means.

Marlene hadn’t told her outright, hadn’t even hinted at it. There’s a part of Ellie that knows Marlene hadn’t ever wanted her to know, and a large part of her resents her for that. What sort of asshole sends a teenage girl to her fucking death without warning her first?

Ellie knew about Cordyceps, though. They had classes in military school, every other day, on the history of the infection and the science behind it. The history, Riley liked to say, was “utter fucking bullshit,” but the science was pretty much sound. It grew inside victims, leaving their brain only functional enough to be vaguely aware of what is happening to it, but unable to actually change anything about its situation. The infected goes through four stages: from weak and impulsive monsters to armored machines. They were taught strategies for each of the different types. They were taught how the fungus presented itself, early symptoms, and what to do if you were infected.

She knew when she was just ten that the fungus grew in the brain. When Marlene told her that the firefly doctors were going to extract the fungus, she knew what that entailed. And if she didn’t right away, she figured it out eventually.

She knew that she should be scared, that she should want to fight it. But hell, what was there left to live for? So much of her had been stolen by the infection that there was barely a shell left over.. And if her death could stop anybody else from turning? Why the hell wouldn’t she do it?

And then she woke up in that car, in a familiar hospital gown, and Joel was driving her away from the hospital. And then he explained that there were dozens of immune, and that the Fireflies had long since given up looking for a cure. She knew it was bullshit. Getting out of that car was maybe the most difficult thing she’d done—feeling the ground beneath her feet when she knew she didn’t deserve it, seeing the town below, full of people whose lives were in danger because she was still there. Whose lives were in danger because Joel was trying to protect her from something.

Maybe he was telling the truth. But.

* * *

She walks slowly, taking measured steps, and she even goes so far as to circle buildings, take the longer routes. It’s still a short trip. 

The house is small, one floor, compact. She’d seen larger houses on the way, but she supposes that Tommy is the sort of person who would take the small option for himself. And she’s not complaining. At least it’s a house.

She has to shift the pile of bed rolls onto one arm in order to push the door open.

The first thing she notices is the music. It’s what sounds—from the recordings she’s heard—like a guitar, and it’s slowly, ambling, single notes plucked out in a simple melody. Her brow furrows as she peers over through the door on her right, but she can’t see anything. She looks at the rest of the house instead. 

It’s lit up inside, a tiny living room, devoid of furniture. The windows are boarded up and the door has little holes along the side of the frame, presumably nails that had been torn out when it’s boards had been pried off. 

Off the left of the living room is another empty room, and you can see various stains and marks on the ground from where the furniture had been. She can just see the corner of another doorway. At one point she might have explored, but she doesn’t. She’s too tired for that. 

“Joel?” she calls, walking toward the sound of the music. 

“Ellie?” His voice is light, joyful. “Hey, kiddo, I’ve got something I think you’re really gonna like—”

He comes out of the room to her right, where she’d thought the music was coming from, and he’s got an honest-to-god fucking guitar in his arms. She forces a small smile.

  
“Isn’t it gorgeous? They have little recitals at the communal center—remember when I said I would teach—” 

Then, as hard as Ellie is trying to hold herself together, everything falls apart. The bed rolls crash to the ground, and she takes in a shuddering breath. And then tears slip out.

“Oh, no, Ellie—” Joel says, his tone changing quickly. He rushes forward, pulling her to his chest. Ellie clutches at him, unable to stop sobbing. “Baby girl, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

She’s not sure if he knows what he’s apologizing for. And her mind is just a mess. She can’t stop thinking about the father and his daughter, outside, free and happy and together. She can’t stop thinking about Riley’s body, small and fractured on the floor of the mall. She can’t stop thinking about her blue polka-dotted hospital gown. And she doesn’t know what she feels or what to do next.

So she just cries.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading!! if you enjoyed it please leave a comment/kudos to let me know what you think!!!


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